While we are waiting for the Marmot’s next post-election piece, here are some thoughts I shared with The Korea Times readers:
The election of Lee Myung-bak (assuming it survives the ongoing BBK investigation) is break from the ideologically-driven politics of Korea’s past. His campaign has explicitly said that “economic considerations must receive higher priority than political considerations.”
Lee’s pragmatism is a marked departure from the Roh Moo-hyun administration, which tended to see challenges facing Korea as moral questions.
That difference will show itself on a range of policy shifts once Lee takes office. The net effect of those changes will be the rise of pragmatic politics over ideological consistency.
While Lee’s election represents a defeat of progressive policies, it is also a final break among mainstream conservatives from their past support of authoritarian anti-communism. In future elections, claims that the campaign being one between pro and anti-democratic forces will ring as hallow as claims that it is a contest is between pro and anti-communist forces.
The bulk of the rest of the article talks about MB’s economic plans.
(Another “man, this MSM stuff is tough” moment follows.)
I actually had a pretty hard time with it. With my regular column, I feel free to write whatever I want but I feel the need to be more ‘official’ with the election specials (I did 3 or for the times.). In the end, it felt like one big boilerplate. Of course, after a year of campaigning, just about everything about Lee Myung-bak has been written hundreds of times.
I can certainly understand why MSM folks spend more time talking about the horse race aspect of elections than the issues. After a couple of weeks of writing about the same thing, you get bored to death of it.
17 Comments
Yes, Lee being a former Hyundai CEO (a label he wears on his sleeve) might be a blessing in disguise. For one, It takes away from him the ability to hide the identity of his corporate allies behind the veil of ideology. Lee will probably be cautious to favor Hyundai, and it’s unlikely that he’ll favor its competitors. Throw on top of that the BBK scandal and you’ve got a president who will want to keep his nose clean.
Good to see the English proofreaders at the hollowed Korea Times are earning their keep.
did you mean hallowed or hollowed?
Andy, I read your piece and there are a few things I didn’t understand.
1. You’ve suggested that Roh views capitalism and business as something that needs to be restrained, and contrasted that with Lee who prefers laissez faire. I think that’s simplistic and perhaps a touch unfair to Roh. I really hate to defend the guy but precisely what do you use for evidence to support that? His administration fucked up the real estate policy and that is definitely an attempt to control the market. But what about free trade? There has been more free trade activity under this administration than any previous.
2. You comment that there is now a clean break for the conservatives from their authoritarian roots. It’s your most insightful comment. But then you follow by saying that no one will ever perceive the dichotomy between pro-and anti democratic forces. I didn’t follow that leap of logic because it seems to me that the conservatives have never campaigned on turning back the clock.
3. Finally, it’s hard to disagree with the general point that this election is a massive repudiation of Roh. But is it a repudiation of progressivism? Or, is it also a reflection of a variety of other things like the absolute disarray that the progressives found themselves in and the absence of a strong alternative to Lee until late in the race (IMHO, 문)? Indeed, isn’t it possible that this is less of a rejection of the last 5 years and, more simply, a warm embrace for absolutely the best candidate, an embrace so tight that even the taint of scandal could not dislodge.
#4,
It’s all that and more. It just depends what voter you’re talking to.
If you’re talking about “free trade”, Korea has yet to engage a real competitor in free trade. The KORUS FTA is a bad deal for the US, and wouldn’t introduce much change.
Just because the Korea Fair Trade Commission is more active than before doesn’t mean it is actively promoting either free or fair trade. Instead, a cynic could view KFTC’s recent flexing of muscles as the Roh gang’s realization that the law can be used to beat up favored bogeymen (chaebol late with the bribe money, and foreigners) without having to prove things in court.
i definitely wasn’t talking about the FTC.
but the country has thrown the door open to agreements with a variety of countries/entities. and whether you personally think the deal is a good one or bad one for your home country doesn’t change the fact that some leaders in your home country signed on to it. it also doesn’t change the fact that prior to the Chile FTA, Korea was one of just a few countries to not have an FTA with another country. (I belive Japan was the other). the Chile FTA was initiated under the previous admin. But this admin upheld it and went several steps further by promoting FTAs much more broadly. That’s what I meant. If you’re waiting for an FTA to fit your own personal ideal of what an FTA should look like, then there’s not really much to discuss, I suppose.
Are consumers in Korea realizing any benefits from the Chile FTA? Just asking — it excluded many of the agricultural products Chile is competitive in, even though Southern hemisphere harvest times mean produce doesn’t go head-to-head with Korean goods. When I left Seoul in late 2004 there was a fear among consumers that any tariff cuts on Chilean wine would be captured by the chaebol-related importers.
#8,
They have reason to be cynical. I can’t remember how many years ago this was, I remember that taxes were reduced on gasoline (it was supposed to reduce prices by either 1/2 a percent or 2 percent, can’t remember exactly, but, in any case, it was small enough that most consumers wouldn’t notice). Some of the cheabols didn’t adjust their prices at the pump and pocketed the difference when the tax was reduced. It took months for the government to get to raising the issue, and then little or nothing was done.
I always saw Roh as extremely pragmatic and not ideology-driven in the slightest. This is the man who overlooked human rights abuses in North Korea when the UN wanted to pass multiple resolutions, the man who returned refugees to their certain death without a second thought, who allows workers at Kaesong to make as little as $3 per month, and who calls North Korea a “workers’ paradise.” Doesn’t sound too ideological to me.
I’d prefer to call Lee a realist.
when you think about imports from chile, don’t just think wine. Think pork. The cheap prices from those do benefit Korea.
The study that I saw two years ago about the trade relationship with Chile was that there were gains on both sides. But clearly the real gainer is the Korean electronics exporters from lower tariffs. I think they might also benefit from the import of some raw materials but those escape me at the moment.
Scholarly articles on trade discuss the ‘gravity theory’ of international trade that posits the amount of trade that will take place between two countries is a function of distance and size. Chile and Korea are rather distant from each other, and neither is an economic juggernaut.
It makes sense that the Korea-Chile FTA hasn’t been very earth-shattering. It was just a symbolic opportunity to show support for free trade at low cost to both domestic constituencies.
This election has very little to do with ideology. (In this respect, Korea is much like the rest of the other democratic nations in the world.) The other guys were in for two terms - ten years, and not all of it bad - and it was time to kick their asses out. Well done!
Did you play hockey before the days of helmets and faceplates, even for goalies?
No, I didn’t. And, goalies wear “masks” not “faceplates.”
Well, nimrod, they were called faceplates when they first came in, although mask later became the convention. I remember seeing Terry Sawchuck’s in the locker room at the old Olympia after the first game in which he wore one. It was a big improvement over Terry’s face which had more stitching scars than you could count. My Dad knew him from AAA, which is how we got in.
I’ve played hockey. Where I grew up, the non-cage masks were hockey faceplates to the Dads and older guys. A faceplate was held onto the face by straps which went back to the “skull plate” — nice bit of symmetry, that.
We kids all called them masks, though, since we had no appreciation for history or tradition, and thought anyone who had gone bald was a loser. God is of course having a laugh at our expense over that last part.
Anyway, one thing we all agreed on was that the Canadiens and their fans were annoying as hell. Worse than even the Red Wings!